Advanced TV Needs New Math

8/02/2010 12:01 AM Eastern

By: Michael Manzo

As advanced TV andvideo platforms gain new capabilities,
they also create new
opportunities and challenges
for measurement. Metrics can
support the growth of new
platforms by reflecting added
value created for consumers,
content distributors and advertisers.

Advanced TV platforms —
such as addressable ads, interactive
TV, video-on-demand
and digital video recorders, as
well as the “over-the-top” TV
Everywhere models like online
video and mobile — require cable
operators to adapt with flexible,
software-based solutions
that can measure audience engagement
across multiple platforms
and adapt in real time.

A recent report by The Diffusion
Group found that 60% of
adult broadband users, which
represent about 95 million
consumers, were “enthusiastic”
about TV Everywhere services
and 34% (about 54 million
customers) were willing to pay
at least $5 per month for online
video. The report also showed
that 39% of pay TV subscribers
would pay $5 or more to access
their favorite TV shows on
a PC (about half of them would
pay $5 extra each month; onethird
would pay an extra $10 per
month; and one-fifth would pay
more than $15 per month).

With new TV Everywhere models,
operators need an audiencemeasurement
solution that
allows them to upsell premium
content with flexible (payper-
use, buy access for a week,
etc.) pricing models. They need
to increase viewership of nonlinear
content (both paid VOD
and premium TV Everywhere).
Doing so will require them to
have the price flexiblity to compete
with such rivals as Apple’s
iTunes Store and Netflix.

Today’s audience-measurement
solutions, such as Nielsen,
only provide data-storage and
reporting capabilities inside
siloed environments. In today’s
multiscreen world, cable operators
are demanding a single
technology solution that allows
them to capture, leverage and
evaluate audience engagements
and interactions across multiple
viewing platforms — from linear
to nonlinear (on-demand) to
viewing data and click-streams
associated with ITV viewing behavior
and subscriber events.

In order for operators to capitalize
on advanced TV and
video, they need to create and
optimize new revenue streams
and eliminate redundant systems
that are typically focused
on service silos. This allows cable
operators to gain comprehensive,
real-time insight into
every way that subscribers use,
view and interact with video services
across multiple platforms.

Operators need a solution
that uniquely extends across all
systems within the network, including
legacy systems, in order
to remove the headache of gathering
data from disparate locations
— it is crucial to aggregate
and unify end-to-end visibility
across all video services.

With an architecture designed
to holistically address
issues such as revenue leakage,
audience measurement, loyalty
and promotion analytics and
network congestion, operators
can create a holistic approach
to converge network and service
data, enhanced by information
from offline subscriber systems,
which unlocks the latent OSS/BSS data assets of operators and
ensures information can be analyzed
and transactions executed
using all available network and
system data.

A vertical-specific data model,
convergent data collection,
cleansing, aggregation, normalization
and enrichment
of storage greatly simplifies
the readiness and availability
of data for both business
intelligence via a data warehouse
and service-delivery
platforms with a centralized
real-time transactional database.
This allows operators to
act in real time, managing identity,
subscriber-entitlement and
service-usage rules across all
services and networks, providing
a horizontal profile capability
to enable services such as
ITV, TV Everywhere, advanced
EBIF applications, e-commerce
authentication and parental
control authentication.

Operators also need to aggregate
data to be shared with
third parties to enable business
relat ionships, helpful
for industry-wide efforts, i.e.,
col laboration on advanced
advertising and other industry-
wide initiatives, like Canoe.
This gives operators the
ability to offer their subscribers
personalized content or
discounts based upon their
viewing habits (e.g. downloading
the soundtrack to a film directly
after viewing the movie
on demand), which adds value
to the consumer and expands
the operator’s opportunities to
monetization.

Measurement is a critical
component to successful advanced
TV and TV Everywhere
models, because if you
can’t count it better, you can’t
sell it.